What does your water bottle say about you? An awful lot judging by the £5.5bn industry that has sprung up to convince us that a designer reusable bottle is a fashion statement and status symbol that comes with added environmental kudos.

“The idea of reusable bottles being a fashion accessory is a good thing,” says Natalie Fee, founder of City to Sea, a Bristol-based nonprofit organisation that campaigns to prevent marine plastic pollution at source. “If you want people to adopt a new behaviour, if you want to create mass change, it helps to have influential people on board. Within the environmental movement, people have been carrying reusable bottles for years, but when you get Love Island contestants using them it is huge – it helps to normalise it.”

Campaigners and water bottle brands cite the tipping point in the public’s awareness of plastic pollution as the BBC’s Blue Planet II series presented by Sir David Attenborough last year, which has led to the chancellor, in his autumn budget, consulting on the introduction of a new tax on plastic packaging.

“It has been monumental in terms of discussion,” says James Butterfield, founder of Chilly’s, which sells £25 bottles popular for flamingo, avocado and floral prints. “We don’t go into a meeting where Blue Planet isn’t discussed – now, with the public turning against plastics, it has meant that when people look for a solution we are well positioned. The impact on our business has been huge.”

This is more than a fashion. It’s the start of a fundamental shift

Louise Edge, Greenpeace

Butterfield, who co-founded the company in 2010 and saw revenues of £2.5m in July last year, is forecasting a sharp rise to £40m in 2019. Chilly’s works with City to Sea on the Refill project, which aims to make free drinking water available on every high street in Britain and save a billion plastic bottles by 2025. With Refill, which was piloted in Bristol, City to Sea has now persuaded thousands of businesses – including John Lewis, Costa, Morrisons, Starbucks, Greggs and Wetherspoons – to allow people to refill their water bottles for free on their premises.

“Airports have been less proactive but we haven’t met much resistance from chains,” says Fee. “It’s hard to know how much is a genuine desire to effect change and how much it’s about the public-shaming consequences if they don’t, but one of the advantages of working with them is that we have a seat at the table to discuss their wider plastic policy.”

Meanwhile, the wellness industry considers hydration as no longer a human necessity but is happily marketing water as an aspiration. Take the Vogue-endorsed ViA gem-water bottles by VitaJuwel, crafted glass bottles costing between £67 and £224 that come with vials of crystals to “vitalise the water”. Bellabeat promises its Spring is the world’s first artificially intelligent water bottle, for those wanting their daily water intake tracked by an app for £79.99.

“If you want someone to carry a bottle around every day, you have to make something that is desirable, that people want to be seen with,” says Kirpal Bharaj, founder of London startup Stay Sixty. “Single-use plastic is an unnecessary evil,” he says, “and it’s not just that it takes years to degrade – 50 million barrels of oil are used to pump, to process and to refrigerate single-use plastic bottles everywhere.” Kirpal and his brother Raj sell their Scandi-design-inspired bottles for £30, buoyed by statistics that show 36% of Britons now own and regularly use a reusable water bottle.

But how has the move towards refilling your bottle from the tap affected water brands? Evian, the UK’s bestselling bottled water, said: “Today, more than 50% of our water is delivered through reusable packaging. Our goal is to eliminate the need for single-use packaging and we plan to launch alternatives to plastic or single-use plastic packaging in all our major water markets by 2025.”

Louise Edge, a plastics campaigner at Greenpeace, said: “People are waking up to the fact that we are producing far more throwaway plastic waste than we can handle, and switching to reusable bottles, coffee cups and bags.”

Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group, estimates there are 150 million tonnes of plastic in the ocean; Greenpeace aims to tackle this one bottle at a time. “This is more than a fashion,” says Edge. “It’s the start of a fundamental shift.”